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say it, don’t spray it

Before you throw rotten veg, hear me out: I also think that there are people who are bi and journeying up and down the Kinsey, and that’s what I’m trying to describe. That’s my best explanation for “ex-gays” who, for whatever reason, find themselves enjoying the straight road. Dress it up in religion if you like, but I don’t think anyone’s ever truly ex-anything.

I rather think it has something to do with who we actually end up loving.

I was sixteen and seventeen when I had an endless crush on a classmate (and, um, a relationship with a girl online — I’ll take “unexpressed polyamory” for $1000, Alex). I was devastated when she graduated a year ahead of me, and I told her how I felt — and she was totally weirded out about it. Oops. So we’ve sort of lost touch completely. I did just look her up on Facebook, and yeah, she married a man, and yeah, seeing it actually hurt a bit. I don’t know that I would want her back in my life or vice versa.

And that’s okay, because here I am, in love with Eleven and so not inclined to screw that up. No, not even if being single and choosing to live monogamously would give me something I want. a) I don’t want it that badly and b) dirty pool. Very dirty pool. Especially since, if it failed, I’d want Eleven to have me back no questions asked. I am admitting that I fear losing what I have more than I want something new, and you know? It’s a vulnerable place. I am vulnerable when I am with him, my guard down, my entire self open. We’re coming up on six years of trust and twin brains, and if the price for that kind of epic love is not living on whims, I’ll pay it gladly.

There’s also the question of authenticity: do I want to live a life that’s built on such changes? With Eleven I am all-natural, 100% Lunochka. That’s how it ought to be in love. Start hiding who you are and sooner or later you’ll be renovating a barn in bloody New Hampshire, unemployed, with no idea what you’ll do for a living. Likely I’d have parlayed that into a nouveau-housewife DIY-loving hipster-riche blog career. Also as likely: I’d have run headlong into the same disability issues, had the same depressions, etcetera. My brain chemistry, myself. My fibro, myself. So even if I’d been deliriously happy with that guy (I wasn’t) (at all) I’d have been compromising a lot of who I was at the time, and the decision I made at the time was to stay true to myself.

(I have a thank-you letter to write to a professor of mine.)

I have got tragically off my point, here. The point! It’s okay, if you feel drawn to swap around the genders of the people you love, to do that. It’s a little less okay to do it because someone else tells you to, and it’s a lot less okay to turn around and use that to hurt other people. You are probably just bisexual and experiencing a shift in what and who you want. Maybe the shift will last. Maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t last, what will you do? Have you asked yourself that lately?

If you think you can bear with another shift in desire, or sublimate it all into religious fervor, I hope you are right. I also hope you have enough compassion in you to not project that onto me.